Eight cubes covered in a thin, dark coat hovered over green patches and ponds of the Playground while avoiding anything that stood in their pre-set route. Whenever there was a corner, they turned the 90 degree corner smoothly and without a hitch with the help of buried magnetic railed pathways . Before the cubes, the Playground used vans to transport the first few generations of participants; they were quickly replaced by Samuel, of all people, who hated the wheel and how it trampled anything that dared to grow in its path.
Inside the cubes it was quiet, relaxing even, especially with dull hum from the magnetic system.
Even the sudden stop was like a light push but that wasn’t enough to stop the contestants’ stomachs from jittering with anticipation. It was finally time for the round to begin.
One by one, each stepped out of the obsidian cubes into the only area inside the Playground that reminded them of the County. A dead field, filled only with small rocks and a fence with barbed wire that rounded the enclosed circle. Even so, the most out-of-the-ordinary object was a tall, thin metallic pole with a holographic projector attached to the top of it sitting in the middle. Soon after, the pole transmitted a single, short, message –
“10 minutes until we begin, any act of violence committed until then will cause points deductions. Over”.
Each team tried to stretch their legs and check out the surroundings, any possible clues on the match and the other competitors. As soon as two of them made eye contact, they sprinted like two unleashed dogs towards each other and embraced in a tight hug. The Drums siblings were the only unwilling patients in the R.O.C, forced by CEOs Robert and Alvara to act as their guinea pigs in the executives test attempt at a long-term strategy.
The siblings, Industry and Berlin Drums were close in height, and shared the same chemically-damaged hair with golden highlights that once passed their knee while they were living with others unemployed behind the walls, stairs and dirt of the Middle Level. Technically, everyone in the County is supposed to serve the city, but for a while now enclaves of sick or fired people started to form after being abandoned by the Brands. And because they were also a potential source of unrest, and an eyesore to some executives, a culling of these groups was started a few decades back.
Only a few would escape that fate, but in turn they were to become parts of the machinations of a Brand. In this case, the Drum’s fate was to be the pawns in two CEOs’ plans of finishing off the C.T.D Serviceman, until number 1 foiled it with a swift move.
After the siblings reunited, and the others started to mingle, only two participants remained without a group- the first one being a crouched, unmoving man who stared into nothingness and barely blinked. Whenever he did, though, it rose an uncanny feeling, like it was calculated; you could time the intervals. He was attached to the hip with his C.T.D., Serviceman, who towered over everyone there present, even passed D’zin by a head.
Alone was also another man, whose body stood out from the rest of the metallic menagerie of his society. While not the athletic type, he was the closest human there with a natural, muscular body, with no scars or protrusions, and signs of any enhancements. In any previous era, his face would have made him a superstar, but his demeanor was unsettling. His mouth kept moving, mumbling to the ground and his sunken eyes galloped from one participant to another, before finally settling on Siete. He whispered, remorsefully: “ Oh, you poor thing. I failed to help you?”
Angie planned on forcing her new, imposed crew to meet her old one, but that wish vanished the moment she spotted a coughing Siete being carried in the hands of their C.T.D. She rushed to them, screaming for medical help.
Angie – “ Siete, what happened, are you alright?”
The clopy groaned a bit, turning their head, and while their face was paler, with gray spots, it was impossible for them to not put on a bright smile and greet their friend in a chipper way. Siete even tried to downplay it a bit, but they became even more bright-eyed when they noticed the hacker.
Siete -“ Ohhhh”, they gasped as if they just met a famous person-” Don’t tell me…those goggles…they’re for interfacing easier to the virtual lines?-” after which they coughed violently, but continued with more gushing for the gadgets. Syna wasn’t sure how to react around a C.E., so she just nervously laughed, for now avoiding getting on Angie’s bad side.
Both Marcos and Angie intervened simultaneously and flicked Siete on the forehead with the tip of their fingers.
-“ Introductions later, explain this. Both of you”, added Angie, scowling at Vivar.
A short retelling later, Syna and Sovereign were dismissed as suspects thanks to Angie’s vouch for them, so that left 4 other possible candidates. The hacker, Syna, was curious that something like this could happen before the first round.
“I should note this down, in case other rules can be broken in the future”, she thought, before coming up with the idea to check the roaster for C.T.Ds with sonic weapons or do a secret scan.
-“ I don’t think that’s necessary”, intervened Marcos as he pointed towards contestant number 7- “He’s been eyeing us and talking to himself ever since he saw Siete. And he has Medusa with him, which I believe used some peculiar ranged weapon before, right?”
Vivar nodded, then put Siete in D’zin’s care and strode menacingly towards them, followed not far behind by Angie, who assured the others that they’d be careful and were only going to have a chat with the two.
Medusa, as her name implied, had no legs, which were replaced by a long tail from the lower hip down, that allowed her to crawl on any semi-flat surfaces. She responded to the threatening knight by mimicking a cobra and hoisted her torso way above Vivar’s head, stretching a long shadow over him, then hunched her back so that her head could meet Vivar’s face to face. She exhausted hot air from a red stretch over her eyes, directly into Vivar’s yellow visor.
For a moment, the two shared only stares- the knight even appeared to be taken back at the sight of the C.T.D. His eyes darted around as he was scanning the bot, and unbeknownst to him his palms appeared to be trembling. His fingers wanted to caress the vicious and threatening face of Medusa- an artifacted emotion he never knew was still capable of.
It lasted only a couple of seconds, but then his mind returned to the present and remembered why the two of them were this close to each other.
-” Explain your actions at the cave”, Vivar demanded firmly. The serpent C.T.D ignored him, while her companion, Allan, looked at him with a twisted compassion, as if he was apologizing for something.
-“ You poor machine. You think you saved your patient, that keeping them alive was your duty, but for what means? After their life is saved, another round will threaten it again and again. The poor clone will be used like…a rag.”
-” And you believe that killing them wo-”
But the boy wasn’t done- he had a speech set up and it didn’t matter to him what others wanted to say, he had to get his words out first- “And well, let’s just say I feel some kinship with the plight of these workers…”
Vivar was left unsure of what to reply with, he didn’t expect the boy to come out with such outright vision. Angie, on the other hand, was fuming in silence, as she heard similar platitudes many times from maddened miners crushed by pressure.
-“ Vivar, how much time is left until the round starts?” Five seconds she got in return. The woman then took some distance and then sprinted towards Vivar, took a leap, and used his shoulder as a jumping pad. She launched herself toward Medusa and punched the robot hard enough to push back the metallic snake a few meters, leaving a dent in the armor.
Angie then got closer to patient 7 Allan Dumeris, who entered in a semi-panicked state the moment he saw her raising her arm as if to slap him. He instantly curved his spine, and covered his head with his hands, murmuring to himself, begging “his Dominance” not to hurt him. She wanted to leave him a meat pulp on the ground for attacking Siete, but also only admonish him for letting the pressure get him.
Pity was all that was left in their wake, as Allan quickly broke down in a nervous state and started praying for forgiveness from an unseen figure-
-“Wait, lord, no, I’m sorry. Please, I’m not tired, I’m not tired, I swear, I’ll do as the Covenant demands of me”, he cried out to his imaginary demander. Medusa then coiled around him and made her intent to protect as clear as possible.
Medusa -” The child of the Society needs to be kept safe. He could still be”, her speech then short-circuited and a recording of a choir of voices took over “-useful in ushering in more natural pleasures.” A shiver went down Vivar’s spine the moment he heard her first voice.
-“Fuck”, Angie blurted under her breath. She felt uneasy about the whole affair and even gave the boy a compassionate glance. “Let’s just go, Vivar. We’ll, we’ll deal with him another time.”
Syna, the most flabbergasted of all of them, cried out in shock after seeing the masked woman punch a C.T.D a few steps backwards- “Oh, wow, you really are an obsidian miner, aren’t you ? Sorry, this is…surprising. I, well, I never thought I’d meet one of your kind. I thought your group never leaves that…”
Angie -” Pit? No, those are just stories. We come up from time to time, but we never or rarely leave our commune towers. It takes too long to get back in the mines, you know, and that would mean…”
-” Credit points deduction”, Angie and Siete said in unison, chuckling about it and then the clopy reeling from the pain it caused.
The pole started glowing and the voice of a mousy woman came from the speakers, who fumbled a bit at her introduction as CEO number 8, but regained composure after reading the traditional pleasantries written centuries ago. With each phrase, the arena changed little by little, walls coming out from the ground and taking the appearance of a target practice field in the middle of a void.
The void then took shape, a form, firstly as a shadow of a giant mouse colony manifesting in the background. The outline of the cartoony hard-working mice then picked up stones and stacked them together in a giant pile. Once Elina ended the speech, so did the colony and the mice took a mandatory smoke break, sponsored by Brand number 8.
-“ The game, dear viewers, is a simple one and is called – Show me your grit!”, after which she stopped and waited for the pre-recorded cheers and applause to stop.
Elina was actually a quick learner for someone who was forced into the job by her familial connections, which wouldn’t accept anything else from the only traditionally bred child of her family. But once the girl became the CEO, mistakes, failures, mistaken failures and successful failures were the only things that defined her time as the chief. She tried to work like her peers and adopt their standard of thinking but Elina never managed to adapt to their directives.
So it was in this case, as she didn’t know how to bend the rules in her favor except for trying to relay them in a certain way.
Elina -” This lovely holographic vermin will hurl their rocks towards the competitors, between 5 and 10 pebbles, depending on your entering order. Oh, and there will be a small perimeter in which you can move, going outside of it will be punished with deductions.” She then took a short break, to see if her team reacted in any way to her words.
-“ We only want to see how you respond, so the pointing method will be displayed at the end. Just so you know, if the C.T.Ds use all of their abilities and equipment, you might get something extra there, at the end. Now, who is going to enter the circle and show me their grit?!”, she yelled out in an explosive cheer from the audience in the County.
The last part left everyone in self-imposed shackles, as neither expected to be asked to show their ace cards so soon, except for one group. Elina was squealing joyfully when she saw that her little maneuver worked- her team was the first to sprint towards the perimeter.
Right after she finished her speech, Siete whispered a slow command, “Run, Vivar”, which he followed before he could even finish his internal calculations for the correct action. While the rest of the humans were still pondering on the last rule, which slumped the C.T.D’s as well, the clopy was half-set to run from when ‘order’ was mentioned and fully set after hearing ‘abilities’. They knew that everyone was mostly aware of what Vivar was capable of, and they had the least to lose here:
-“ I don’t think there was something else to think about”, said Siete to their companion after they reached the goal.
After them, Syna and Sovereign were the second to take the sprint, followed by Team 1, Billy and Serviceman; with the final order being set as: 8-2-1-6-3-5-4-7